A MAN'S BLESSING

Sicily, its centuries-old code of silence, the resultant cynicism and moral poverty, are given elegant packaging in this short, sophisticated conundrum of a crime story. It starts with an anonymous letter to a small-town pharmacist and curls like the smoke of a particularly acrid fire into priests' parlors, the homes of the murder victims' widows, and drives an over-bright, under-protected school teacher before it. The special twist from this fine Italian hand is that everybody knows who-dun-it and why. It's the self-punishing conspiracies that make the suspense.